Log Format

The GPS track log created by the Ricoh 500SE is in a proprietary format and must be converted (eg. to GPX format) before it can be used. The popular GPSBabel software can do that. A sample log looks like:

The fields are: longitude, latitude, altitude, new track, UTC date (DD-MM-YYYY) and time (HH:MM:SS). The "new track" field is "1" when a new track starts.

Log File Naming

The log files created by the camera are stored on the SD card in a folder called "GPSLOG". They are named "YYMMDDNN.LOG", where NN increments from 00 through to 99. The camera appends new tracks into the current file, hence the "new track" field. When the current file reaches about 500K, NN increments and logging continues into the new file. Therefore, there may be multiple tracks in each log file, and tracks may span one or more files. You may want to manually split and reassemble the logs before converting them. Search for ",1," in a text editor to find the start of each track. Alternatively, GPSBabel can automatically split them based on time thresholds. See below.

Conversion to GPX

With GPSBabel, use the "xcsv" input type with the following style (save the following into a file, eg "ricoh.style"):

You could also use the "track" data filter to merge all the files into one big track, then split them based on time/distance thresholds. If you perform a fast 1 second log interval, a split on 1 minute gaps should work. Something like: